Corporate report

Part 2: our people and values

Published 29 January 2021

How our approach to workforce equality, diversity and inclusion complies with section 149 of the Equality Act

HMRC colleague equality objectives 2016 to 2020

Our workforce equality aims for 2016 to 2020 were to:

• create and maintain a diverse workforce that better reflects HMRC’s customer base
• create a working environment that values difference and fosters an inclusive workplace culture where colleagues from all backgrounds can give their best, are treated fairly, are valued for their contributions and where they can progress their careers

We have visible top-level commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion through diversity champions on our Executive Committee, who are driving our diversity and inclusion ambitions. We also have employee networks and consultation groups for 8 diversity strands, providing safe spaces to share experiences and contribute to creating positive change.

These groups help ensure our colleagues have a voice and that equality, diversity and inclusion are considered in our decision-making. We want our people to understand and reflect our customers’ diversity as we know this helps us to deliver a high-quality service.

We want HMRC to be a great place to work where we feel trusted, respected and confident in our roles. It’s crucial to address issues we know exist in the way we live our values, so we’ve created new expectations of behaviour and strengthened our policies and support to help everyone in HMRC have a good working life.

We have also:

• opened 2 new regional centres in Bristol and Belfast
• exceeded our target to see 13.8% of HMRC colleagues are from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background, against our aim of 12.8%
• supported 89 people in completing our personal development programme for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic colleagues

During 2019 to 2020, almost 17,000 staff shared their views about what it feels like to work in HMRC, and how to make it better. As a result, we drew up our new internal behavioural guide ‘Our Commitments’.

Our Commitments reflect, in the words of our people, how they want to treat each other and be treated. We worked together to develop them, because we all want the experience of working in HMRC to be a good one, and we set out the following 5 new commitments for how we value and treat each other:

• be fair, kind and human
• not create fear in others
• include people, regardless of difference
• work together, recognising our common goal
• have honest conversations with respect

Embedding Our Commitments in everything we do is driving significant cultural change. We are undertaking a comprehensive review of our HR policies and guidance to ensure they reflect Our Commitments. For example, in February 2020 we introduced a revised Raising Concerns policy.

This makes the process of how concerns are raised, including harassment, bullying and discrimination, more accessible, responsive, and effective.

We have taken an evidence-based approach, using data and insight to identify and understand disparities in outcome and under-representation, and targeting our actions to address these. For example, we identified that overall, the proportion of women, disabled colleagues and Black, Asian and minority ethnic colleagues decreased as the seniority of the role increased.

We have increased the diversity of our workforce overall, exceeding our target representation rates during the period. For example, by March 2020, 13.8% of our colleagues were from a Black, Asian and minority ethnic background, up from 9.9% at the start of the period in March 2016 and against an internal target of 12.8%.

We have increased the diversity of our senior leaders. From April 2016 to March 2020:

• the proportion of Black, Asian and minority ethnic colleagues in SCS roles increased from 4.5% to 9.4%
• the proportion of women in SCS roles increased from 41.2% to 45.8%
• the proportion of disabled people in SCS roles increased from 3.5% to 5.6%

We continue to encourage our colleagues to declare their diversity details so that we can improve the quality of our data and ensure we are inclusive in our workforce measures. We have shifted the emphasis away from a compliance approach towards how the data informs our work on embedding Our Commitments and Inclusion. This initiative has the full support of our Trade Unions.

Alongside our evidence-based approach, review of policies and support for behavioural and cultural change, we continue to provide tailored support, for example last year we supported 89 people to complete our personal development programme for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic colleagues.

Support for disabled colleagues

We have achieved the highest-level accreditation (Leader) in the government’s voluntary Disability Confident employer scheme. This means we have involved disabled people in providing evidence to show how our processes support us to recruit and retain disabled people.

We support disabled colleagues with our ‘workplace adjustment passport’, which has 3 main functions:

• to support conversation between an employee and their line manager about the disability, health condition or gender reassignment and any workplace adjustments that might need to be made
• to act as a record of that conversation and of the adjustments agreed
• to act as a record of any adjustment made for individuals as supportive measures.

It gives access to expert HR support and through continuous improvement. This year we focused on improving our attraction and recruitment processes to make them more inclusive.

We are assessing our ability to recruit the best, talented people, revising our process for making reasonable adjustments for disabled people so it is simpler, clearer and user-focused, and improving the accessibility of our IT system.

HMRC promotes a number of talent programmes to support the development and progression of disabled colleagues, including the Positive Action Pathway and DELTA programme (Disability Empowers Leadership Talent) for future senior leaders.

Our equality, diversity and inclusion highlights

We have:

• aspirational goals to improve representation rates throughout the department
• improved our understanding race equality challenges and started to use our improvements to build a more inclusive workplace for all colleagues, including a series of listening events to ensure all colleagues are aware of the challenges experienced by Black, Asian and minority ethnic colleagues.
• scoped a comprehensive review of our Workplace Adjustment process to support managers and disabled colleagues to access workplace adjustments in an inclusive, streamlined and timely way
• scoped work on the accessibility of the IT systems used by our colleagues, for example to ensure that all new systems adopted will comply with accessibility requirements and introduced live captions (subtitles) on Microsoft Teams
• increased the availability of our diversity data to inform decision-making, tailor and target interventions, and to measure impacts.
• continued to invest resources in our National Diversity Networks and set up equality, diversity and inclusion groups in our new Regional Centres
• worked beyond legal compliance to support colleagues who are carers with a network and launching STRIDE, our mentoring scheme for colleagues from lower socio-economic backgrounds

Awards for equality, diversity and inclusion

The awards we won include:

• 50th place in the top 75 UK employers in the Social Mobility Employer index 2019
• featuring in ‘The Times’ list of the Top 50 employers for women 2019
• the Diversity and Inclusion Award at the Civil Service Awards 2019 for HMRC’s Bristol Race Network
• being recognised by Employers for Carers as a ‘carer confident accomplished employer’

How HMRC is supporting colleagues through coronavirus

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we focused our Respect at Work programme on supporting all our people, whether working at home or in safe and healthy offices, through this difficult time. The extensive changes we have made to our IT systems put us in a strong position to move most of our people to home working.

Our IT colleagues worked at tremendous pace to expand our virtual private network within a matter of days, enabling around 90% of our colleagues to work remotely when the national lockdown began in spring 2020.

Internally, we completed a COVID-19 equality analysis to identify areas of concern and equality impact for our colleagues. This ongoing work informs the considerable HR policy response to the pandemic that prioritised inclusion and wellbeing.

For colleagues required to work from home, we addressed potential equality issues through a project to deliver office-based workplace adjustments, such as specialist chairs, keyboards and mice to their homes.

Colleagues could also purchase essential equipment they needed, which helped to ensure that as many colleagues as possible were able to continue working. We will reflect on what we have learned from our response to the pandemic and how we build this into our future strategy.

Our approach for 2020 to 2024

Every day, HMRC does brilliant work to develop and deliver policies and services that affect the lives of people across the country and beyond. Actively considering equality, diversity and inclusion in everything we do with our customers and our colleagues is critical to our success.

We have made good progress towards treating all customers and colleagues fairly, protecting society from harm and making HMRC a great place to work and we will continue to work to achieve these aims. We have set out how we will do this in our 2020 to 2024 equality objectives, which spans our strategic approach to equality, diversity and inclusion for customers and colleagues.

Go straight to part 3, section 1: HMRC workforce diversity data 2019 to 2020.